Sarah has a difficult job. As she presumably wants to court American liberals – she can’t go full Hirsi “civilizational struggle so let’s go get ’em” and nor can she go full Zuhdi “I want to reform Islam and my personal practice of Islam is better,” as she is an atheist.

So she makes sophist distinctions between Muslims and Islam. Her basic contention is that “Islam bad” and “Muslims are just people.” So presumably Islamic text is bad and that is motivating the otherwise not bad Muslims to be bad.

Whatever. It’s fairly well established that the religious text does not really motivate the believer like we like to commonly believe. The problem is not Islam text per se – it is the widespread illiberal views of Muslims.

But she can’t directly attack Muslims because there is no more space for that in the American left especially after the election of Trump.

So she focuses on Islam as if the Muslims worldwide are Scalia like strict constructionists of the Islamic text and their behavior is actually coming out of their understanding of the text. So let’s change/reform the text and problem solved!

Ok – I will take your word on this. I also think Sarah Haider, Ali Rizvi etc. are a very different breed of ex-Muslims than we have seen in the past. They are not hateful about Muslims and this makes it difficult for them to get popularity on the right.